The awards are:

Gold Award (and $5000): Evolutionary Game Design

by Cameron Browne
Yavalath, a rently commercialized board game that is already ranked higher than popular games like Backgammon and Chinese Checkers in the BoardGameGeek database, was in fact designed by a computer program using standard genetic programming techniques.

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Silver Award (and $3000): Automated probe microscopy via evolutionary optimization at the atomic scale

by Richard A.J. Woolley, Julian Stirling, Philip Moriarty, Natalio Krasnogor and Adrian Radocea, University of Nottingham, UK.
The scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) is a Noble prize winning invention that gives access to atom-scale images and manipulations. It remains however tedious to parameterize, and human-competitive tuning has been obtained by coupling Machine Vision techniques with a Cellular Genetic Algorithm.

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Bronze Award (and $2000): Scalable Human-Competitive Software Repair

by Michael Dewey-Vogt, Stephanie Forrest, Claire Le Goues and Westley Weimer of the University of New Mexico and University of Virginia.
GenProg is a software tool that non only detects bugs, but can also automatically repair the bugged code using Genetic Programming. It was able to repair more than half of 105 defects from 8 open-source programs totaling 5.1 million lines of code.

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Honorable Mentions

  • Automatic Generation of Software-Based Functional Failing Tests by Ernesto Sanchez, Giovanni Squillero and Alberto Tonda, Politecnico di Torino and Institut des Systèmes Complexes, Paris, France.
  • Genetic Programming Based Feature Generation for Automated DNA Sequence Analysis by Uday Kamath, Armarda Shehu and Kenneith A. De Jong, Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, USA.